It’s opening night for Quiet Dawns, and Sasha is onstage, flying through the forest as if she had wings, on an assignment from Sergeant Gleb to go back to their base and report that a regiment of Germans is laying mines around the lake. Gleb and Liza had a little time to talk after he told her how to retrace her steps back to the base: first through the forest, then through the swamp (make sure you take the birch pole we left by the big pine on the way here), and then across the field just before the base where they came from. There was a song they sang in their village, he said, a song Liza started to hum because she knew it well. Gleb pressed his hand to her mouth to silence her because the Germans were getting close, and for a few moments, he kept his palm on her face before he pulled it back. This is all that she is thinking of right now: his hand, the smell of it, tobacco and warm skin, the smell that is now propelling her through the forest.

Thinking of that moment, she flies past the tall pine where they left the birch pole, not realizing it until it’s too late to go back. There are scores of big, dead branches scattered in the puddles on the brink of the swamp, and she quickly chooses one. Then she takes off her skirt, ties it to the top of the pole, and steps into the swamp.

At first, the swamp is not very deep, and Sasha even calms down a bit as she waddles along the sloshy path. She thinks of her mother breaking the military order when she operated on a civilian at the front, a nine-year-old boy, before she was born. It took her mother a second to evaluate the alternative between the military rule and a child’s life before she chose life. She didn’t hesitate to disobey the commissar and do what she knew was right. So why does she apologize for the heartlessness of their motherland, for the long shadow of that commissar today?

Onstage, she walks, connecting the firm hillocks with her feet, until there is only the last few hundred meters of dirty ooze left before her, the most difficult stretch. The quivering depths of all her insecurity and fears, of all her losses and guilt. How does she locate firm ground to support her and lend her some understanding? How can she fight back the feeling that she is standing on nothing at all?